Friday, October 07, 2005

Governments don't lose wars

People rarely win wars; governments rarely lose them.
- Arundhati Roy, writer and activist (1961- )

Does that seem like a contradiction? It isn't. A government remains
intact if someone dies. No one accepts full responsibility for
anything in government.

If you look at the lives of everyone who is affected by war in any
way, not a single one of them is improved as a result of war. Many
continue their lives after a war with post traumatic stress syndrome
that never disappears. At best it gets suppressed.

No one who doesn't have a death wish begins a war in their own
neighbourhood. Wars are always begun "over there." Other governments
begin wars in our neighbourhood.

A government trains its soldiers to kill without remorse. An
individual who does that is convicted to life imprisonment or death.

No one truly understands war because they are waged by governments.

Government work is carried out by people who are trained to have no
people skills. If what they do results in harm, they have no remorse.

It's not their fault. It's the government. Governments have no
conscience. Governments rarely lose wars because the enemy was always wrong.

The enemy, it turns out, has no conscience either.

Bill Allin
'Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social
Problems,' striving to teach children ethics that become the basis for
conscience in adulthood.
Learn more at http://billallin.com/cgi/index.pl

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